Is the World of Work Really Changing That Much in Health and Social Care?
The 10-year plan is aspirational. The three big shifts sound fantastic. Everyone nods sagely and goes back to the day job. But nobody has answered the question of how. In this session from the Connected Health & Care Summit 2026, Kate Harper, a workforce strategist with 20 years of experience across academia, NHS Professionals and consulting, challenges the sector to stop waiting for a plan that may never come and start doing the things that matter regardless of which future scenario plays out.
Watch Kate Harper challenge two decades of strategic workforce planning, present three scenarios for the NHS workforce, and argue that failure demand, not headcount, is the real productivity problem to solve.
What the session covers and the central argument
This session takes a bird’s-eye view of NHS workforce planning and asks what organisations should be doing today when nobody knows what the future will look like. The central arguments were:
- The 10-year plan and the long-term workforce plan are aspirational but contain no plan for the “how”
- Strategic workforce planning, as traditionally practised, has often struggled to translate workforce projections into action when funding and organisational constraints remain fixed
- The Health Foundation estimates approximately one third of all NHS work is failure demand, work created by broken processes, workarounds and duplication
- Contradictory signals make planning more difficult: 100,000 vacancies but agency spending is being cut, graduates cannot get jobs, and the biggest temporary staffing supplier had its credit rating downgraded in the same week a US firm spent $437 million buying into the UK market
- The things worth doing now are the things that matter across different scenarios
